[fourthark]

You're probably in an obscure niche domain, or asking it to do something creative.

Try like upgrading JS package dependencies, or translating between languages, limited tedious things, and you will be surprised how much better it does.

[exfalso]

Hmmmm.. I am working in a niche domain (Confidential Computing) and the work is fairly creative, although I wouldn't say I asked it domain-specific things. I didn't ask it to come up with encryption schemes or security protocols, I learned very quickly that it cannot even start on those problems. "Design discussions" were just sycophantic affirmations of whatever I wrote. What I mostly tried were "add this function" or "refactor this based on XY" or "analyze this piece of code for race conditions".

(Un?)fortunately my work doesn't involve a lot of "drone coding". With personal projects I let it do whatever it wanted including picking the language and libraries. With one of them it ended up so confused with the Redis API(!!!) that it kept going back and forth between different versions to "fix" the issues until it literally removed the functionality it was supposed to add. Problem solved, eh?

[fourthark]

Oh I've definitely seen that too, even with common front-end stuff.

I think people might be exaggerating how much they are out of the loop. Claude often needs to be guided away from stupid decisions, and it will absolutely delete code in order to "fix" a problem.

Still, it saves me work on tedious stuff, and makes it more pleasant. I wouldn't ask it to do anything I don't understand, unless I don't care about the result.

[fourthark]

I'd add, ask it to ask you questions! That way you can make sure it understands the problem.